Dear All, today I upgraded my system from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39 which has the appreciated side-effect that groff 1.23.0 is finally installed by default.
I tested the new installation. As was to be expected, groffer was gone (I liked it for q&d test runs of code snippets, so I actually miss it. I wrote a small shell script to which calls groff and the pdf viewer, so that is fair enough as a substitute). However, I was eager to see whether anything has changed on the font side. Under an out-of-the-box setup of my previous groff-1.22.4 installation (delivered with Fedora 38), I could not print the characters \[<=] and \[>=]. Little crossed boxes appeared instead. My workaround then was .char ≤ \o'<_' which looks close enough to the glyph displayed by my system font for the terminal, and goes well with a document typeset in Helvetica. On the other hand, Greek symbols for math and statistics, like Chi Square, could be entered in the file as χ\~² and appeared quite as expected. Without the spacing command, the north-east end of χ ends up in the hook of the ². Enter groff 1.23.0. I compiled the same file again (a translation which I had finished just this morning, not knowing what an escape I had*), and alas! things took an unexpected course. First I looked for the appearance of ≤ and was astonished to see that not only was it invisible, it was truly invisible as no placeholder box appeared; blank space was there, at least. Then I noticed strange holes in the text --- the Greek letters did not show up either. Again, no placeholder box, just white space. So, this is a brand-new Fedora 39 installation with groff version 1.23.0, the URW fonts being found in /usr/share/fons/urw-base35/. My first question: Is this new behaviour intended? If so, what I am I supposed to do? If not, what kind of tests and diagnostics should I conduct? If I compile a minimal ms document like .PP 1≤2 I can copy and paste the white space between 1 and 2 from the resulting pdf document, and lo and behold, it is a "≤" ! And, as a side-note, there is a typo in refer(1), right in the first line(2) of ther first contiguous paragraph: "a preprocessor that prepares bibilographic citations". As a second side-note, I am willing to learn. I discovered the BUG-REPORT instruction. So for my next observation, I'll go to Savannah. Thank you a lot, Best regards, Oliver. * I had to meet a deadline this morning, handing in my work just so-so in time. -- Dr. Oliver Corff Wittelsbacherstr. 5A 10707 Berlin GERMANY Tel.: +49-30-85727260 mailto:oliver.co...@email.de
